


maybe it will all be okay

by Nori_Chan



Series: hurting henry hidgens [3]
Category: StarKid Productions RPF, The Guy Who Didn't Like Musicals - Team StarKid
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Anorexia, Blood and Gore, Depression, Dissociation, Eating Disorders, Emma is a Good Friend, Memory Issues, Mentions of Suicide, Minor Character Death, Polyamory, Pre-Canon, Repressed Memories, Self-Hatred, Sort Of, Suicidal Thoughts, Survivor Guilt, Working Boys, but hidgens is scary sometimes, but its because of his meds, but not in much detail, but not talked about in detail, description of violence, henry has a shitty memory, mild hallucinations, the others try their best
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-07
Updated: 2019-05-07
Packaged: 2020-02-27 14:46:23
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,008
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18741202
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nori_Chan/pseuds/Nori_Chan
Summary: Henry can't deal with his past in a healthy manner, so he tends to repress all of his memories until they all come bubbling up to the surface





	maybe it will all be okay

**Author's Note:**

> sort of my own workin' boys origin story. i kind of wrote this about my own personal experience with sleep medication, how it made me both remember a lot of old memories and forget entire days at a time. scary stuff. enjoy! let me know what you think!

_“Henry, dinner’s ready!”_

_Henry paused from scribbling in his notebook, sighing as he set down his pencil. How long had he been sitting at his desk? Judging from the way his joints cracked when he stretched, it must have been a few hours at least. He tossed the notebook down and glanced at the time: 6:30. The boys must have been home for a while yet._

_“It’s gonna get cold!”_

_“On my way down!” Henry called back. He stood from the chair and ran a hand through his messy hair. Only twenty-one, and it was already grey. Being a college senior could do that to you._

_Sure enough, some of his boyfriends were already sitting around the dining room table waiting for him. He smiled wearily at the ones present as he threw himself down in his usual spot. Leighton clapped him on the back._

_“Hey, Hen! What’ve you been up to today?”_

_“Just, uh, working on my grad thesis--”_

_Greg butted in, his face perplexed. “Dude, you don’t gotta worry about that till next semester though.” Of course he wouldn’t understand; he was the biggest procrastinator of the group._

_“Oh, lay off, Greg.” Mark had just walked in through the front door, soaking wet. Stu followed close behind with an umbrella in one hand and a book in the other. He didn’t even look up to gather the context of the situation. He always had Mark’s back. “Yeah, Greg, lay off.”_

_Greg stuck his tongue out at the pair while Henry snickered. His smirk turned into a soft grin when he felt Steve’s muscular arms wrap around his chest from behind._

_“Too bad it’s raining,” Steve remarked as he watched the soaked pair kick off their shoes. “We were hoping to grill today.”_

_“Wait,” Leighton interrupted, “who is this ‘we’ you speak of?”_

_Everyone in the room shared a worried glance, and as if on cue, the fire alarm went off and the sprinklers started._

_“Goddammit Chad!” they all collectively shouted, and there was a mad scramble with some of them heading to the kitchen to put out the fire that had no doubt started and others running upstairs to check if their belongings were drenched. The shouting died down when only Henry and Stu were left in the dining room. They caught each others’ eyes and started laughing._

_“Guess I’ll order a pizza,” Stu grinned as he headed out of the room, patting Henry’s shoulder as he passed. It was complete chaos, but for a moment, Henry felt like he was truly at peace in the world. If only the moment could last forever…_

The alarm went off, and Henry Hidgens woke up with a start. He was usually awoken by soft showtunes that would lull him out of sleep, but ever since he had started taking sleep medication, he found that only the blaring siren could rescue him from sleeping all day. He slammed a hand down on the machine while the other went to wipe his groggy eyes. Wet. Was he crying in his sleep again? It wasn’t even a bad dream this time; if anything, he should have felt happy. But a ball of pure dread was already forming in the pit of his stomach.

“Get it together, Hidgens,” he murmured to himself as he began to rise and dress for the day. He hadn’t thought of his boys in a while; the meds made his mind foggy and his vision of their cheerful faces blurry. He was so sure that he had started to move past all that. So why was he thinking of them now?

A soft buzz from his phone pulled him out of his thoughts. A glance at the contraption showed that he had received an email from one of the many students he had never bothered to learn the name of. It was an inquiry to see if he could take a look at her thesis. Her… thesis…

_“So what are you doing for your thesis, Hen?”_

_Everyone rolled their eyes when Steve asked that question. They were all sitting in their shared living room, chatting and relaxing in front of the crackling fireplace. He looked around at the group confused while the others groaned._

_“He’s only been talking about it all the time,” Greg teased the tall boy curled up next to him on the couch. Henry ignored the others, beaming as he sat up straight with a wild gleam in his grey-blue eyes. Steve was already starting to regret asking._

_“I’m going to help some professors in the lab study that meteor that crashed a few cities from here.” There was much, much more to it that that, but he didn’t want to talk his boyfriends’ ears off. Again._

_Leighton cut in, pride for the nerdy boy evident in his tone. “Yeah, and then he’s gonna prove that aliens exist and become famous or something.”_

_It was Henry’s turn to roll his eyes then. “Yeah, yeah, yeah…”_

His hands were shaking, and he didn’t know why. The memory was already fading from his head when he made it downstairs. His breathing was unsteady, and he found that he couldn’t walk very straight. He found himself standing in the kitchen, leaning up against the cluttered island. Part of him was struggling to grab hold of the fragment of memory while another part was trying to force it completely down the drain. It was painful to think about, but why? Why couldn’t he remember?

His phone buzzed in his pocket once more, and he snarled at in, expecting another email from an ungrateful student. However, he was elated to see that it was a text from Emma, the only friend that he had in that lonely town of Hatchetfield. Every weekday morning, he would grab breakfast with her at Beanies’ whether she was working or not. They hadn’t been able to meet up for an entire two weeks, and it was starting to wear him down. She was the only person he interacted with, yet he hadn’t seen her in ages outside of a few shared words in passing when they happened to run into each other and the occasional text. But today…

...was going to be exactly like every other day. He frowned down at the text that simply read _”can’t meet 2day, sry_ and sighed in disappointment. He fumbled for a moment trying to get his shaky fingers to type out a message.

_“I could really use a friend righ”_

Too needy. Delete.

_“I’m scared I’m going to hurt m”_

Manipulative. Stop being an asshole. Delete.

_“I just want to d”_

Ugh. Delete.

_“That’s fine. I’ll see you around :)”_

There, was that really that hard? Sure, he didn’t feel like it was “fine” but he had to remember that Emma had a life and other friends than him. A new boyfriend, in fact. He was a nice young man, everything that Emma deserved, but he hated musicals. Henry thought she could do better.

Unfortunately, that meant that the professor was on his own for breakfast. Normally, he would just go without, but he already felt guilty for throwing up his only meal yesterday. He knew if he relapsed too hard that Emma would start to notice, and he really didn’t want to disappoint her.

_“Not like she sees you all that much anyway.”_

Jesus Christ, Henry, stop being a piece of shit. He flung open the fridge and grabbed the first item he saw: a half-gallon of milk mi l k m i l k--

_The substance gathered from the meteor was milky white with little speckles of blue throughout. The hazmat suit he had to wear was uncomfortable, but he knew he had to take precautions. No one in the lab knew what the shit was, what it was made of, or what it could do. None of their tests were producing results that made sense, and they were almost completely out of ideas._

_That was until Henry saw it move one night._

_It was late. He could have been imagining it, but the atoms in the substance that had previously been dormant had started to shake ever so slightly under the microscope after being exposed to harsh light. He made some swift marks in the notebook sitting next to him as the thing began to mutate, atoms multiplying right in front of him. He was so entranced by the transformation that he didn’t realize how tired he was and how his head was starting to slip…_

Henry dropped the milk, the lid popping off and creamy liquid falling all over the floor. He hardly seemed to care that his socks were slowly starting to soak. Why had that memory--he had worked so hard to forget, why was--?

He stepped out of the milky puddle that had formed and grabbed the mop from the broom closet. His hands were still shaking, but cleaning up the mess kept his mind occupied for a moment so he wouldn’t have to think of the vision he had just seen. After it was mopped up, he put threw away the empty bottle and changed his socks. Forget breakfast; he needed to get to work.

The bike ride to campus helped clear his mind a bit, and for a little while, he was determined to make this day a great one despite the rough morning. However, as soon as he walked into his first lecture, he knew that wasn’t going to be the case.

He looked worse than usual, red and purple bags under his eyes piercing against his pale skin. He stumbled over his words and had to repeat the same sentences repeatedly, sometimes giving up and moving on to the next point. He rambled so he wouldn’t have the chance to let his brain wander back into those dark places it wanted to go to early that morning. Even his least-bright students picked up on the fact that he wasn’t doing so great. In the middle of one of his lectures on diseases, he stumbled over the word “melioidosis” so many times that his students were becoming concerned.

“Professor, are you okay?”

He was in the middle of making some grand motion with his hands, trying to emphasize a point that had already slipped his mind, but at the question, he froze completely in place. He was remembering something awful, oh god--

_“Henry! Are you okay?”_

_He lifted his head from table and went to wipe the drool off of his face. He was surprised when his hand collided with something that wasn’t his skin, and it was then that he realized he was wearing a hazmat suit. Wait, where was he?_

_Chad was the one that was shaking him, but when he turned, he met all the concerned eyes of his favorite boys. He flashed them a groggy smile, trying to wave off their worries. “Don’t worry about me, I’m…”_

_He couldn’t finish the sentence when realization dawned upon him. He had fallen asleep in the lab. According to the clock on the wall, it was 8:05 AM, and the doors to the lab, which he was sure he had locked last night, automatically unlocked at 8. That meant…_

_He hadn’t put the specimen away._

_It was overflowing out of the petri dish now, the heat lamp having never been turned off. Henry flicked it off swiftly, and the substance seemed to settle down slightly. It had spilled out onto the table, and he knew that was going to be a bitch to clean up._

_Worse yet was the fact that none of his friends were wearing safety gear._

_“Woah, what is that gunk?” Mark moved closer to the virus, but Henry was quick to push him back._

_“What are you doing here?” the biology student snapped, clearly on the verge of a panic attack._

_“You didn’t come home last night, so we went looking for you,” Leighton responded as calmly as he could, but it seemed that Henry’s fear was starting to rub off on them. The boys all took an apprehensive step back, even Mark, who had seemed so excited to get a closer look at the meteor shit._

_“The door was unlocked,” Stu remarked with a gesture towards said lab door, “we thought it was safe to come in.”_

_There was nothing but silence for a moment. Greg broke it. “It… it is safe to be in here, right? Right, Hen?”_

“Professor?”

Hidgens glanced up at the voice that came from a concerned student somewhere high above him in the audience. He blinked blearily for a moment, awkwardly coughing back a sob that threatened to crawl its way out of his throat. Now wouldn’t that be embarrassing, crying like a baby in front of your whole class.

“I’m fine,” he replied slowly, sounding like he was far off in a daze. He glanced at the clock, grateful that they only had about fifteen minutes left. “Why don’t you guys head out early? I’ve got some paperwork to do.”

The students cleared out quickly as they were eager to be able to leave class early. He waited until they all left before collapsing in his chair and covering his face in his hands. He felt like that college student again, panicked and terrified and not knowing what to do. His body shook from the sobs that his lungs could no longer hold back, and for a moment, he could almost imagine the warm hands on his back, the whispers in his ears telling him that everything was going to be all right. But it wasn’t all right, and he was completely alone, had been for decades. Why now of all times?

Another buzz. Another text from Emma. _“sry 4 missing class”_ That’s right, she should’ve been in that lecture. Thank god she wasn’t; he wasn’t really in the mood for her pity right then.

_“It’s fine. I can go over the slides with you tonight._

Every other Friday was musical night. She bailed on him last time, but surely she wouldn’t do it again.

_“gonna have 2 miss got plans w/ paul”_

Henry shoved the phone into his coat pocket to get it out of his sight. Of course she didn’t want to hang out with him. He was a no good stupid idiot who could only ever let his friends down, could only ever fuck things up like he had back then, like he had--

_The emergency shower station wasn’t designed to hold six people at once, but Henry was desperate to get all of his boyfriends hosed down immediately. They had protested at first, but it seemed like they were all slowly beginning to understand just how severe the situation actually was._

_They were going to have to be quarantined._

_The first thing Henry had done was contact authorities, someone who could help. Of course, with it being a virus from outer space, the government was contacted almost immediately. The lab was sealed off with only Henry and a few agents from an organization called P.I.E.P. allowed inside. Even though he had been wearing (and still was wearing) a hazmat suit, it was deemed too dangerous for the biology student to be allowed to leave the room._

_“Is all of this really necessary?” Chad asked through the sealed door of the emergency quarantine sub-room. Henry stood on the other side pacing, trying to ignore the government agents that were darting about the laboratory. They were all searching for a cure to whatever the college boys had been exposed to._

_“Yes, it is necessary,” the young gray-haired man repeated for the umpteenth time. “We need to wait at least twenty-four hours to see if the virus has any effect on humans.”_

_“You make it sound so scary,” Steve tried to joke, but even he, the class clown to rule all class clowns, was looking more than a little worried._

_Henry just wanted his friends to be okay. “It’ll be fine,” he assured even though he wasn’t totally positive himself, “these guys will find a cure in no time. They’re professionals, they’ve said they’ve dealt with situations like this before.”_

_His friends tried to smile back at him through the glass window, but it all felt so fake. So wrong. None of this was going to be okay, they could all sense it. There was a heavy feeling of dread in the air that was going to come crashing down and--_

His feet had somehow managed to lead him outside and to his bike. The sun had begun to set, and the cold air made his skin feel as numb as his insides. A paper crinkled in his pocket as he walked, and he didn’t need to look at it to know what it was. He must have written the letter while he was blacked out; where had the hours gone? What had he been doing all day? Those were questions that didn’t really need answers, he supposed, as they wouldn’t really matter soon enough.

The bike ride home was just as uneventful as the ride that morning had been, just as repetitive. Every day of his pathetic life was the exact same thing: wake up, teach, go to bed. Before Emma, there was very little in between. Even now, he found himself falling back into that old cycle. What happened to that exciting life he had wanted to lead so many years ago?

Tears he hadn’t meant to cry were already streaming down his face, blurring his vision in a delightful way. If he got hit by a car in the dead of night, who's to say it was his fault? He hoped it would be slow. Fall to the pavement, crash his head against cement and let the blood mix with the broken bones, jutting out from pale flesh, ripping him to ribbons in an unholy statue of despair as he cries bloody murmurs of agony and ecstasy to the heavens that would surely reject him, would surely send him straight down to hell, hell, hell

_The coughing led to fits. The fits led to hallucinations. The hallucinations led to violence._

_He watched helplessly as his friends tore each other to bits--_

Oh, god, no; feet pedaled harder in the dead of night.

_watched them rip each other limb from limb in a violent rage--_

It should’ve been him, he, who collapsed onto the lawn of the yard and stumbled blindly past the gate and towards the door

_listened to their screams of sorrow and despair as the virus took over their brains and made them want to itch through their skin, rip at their own eyeballs and flesh--_

He couldn’t take it anymore; gun pulled from the satchel, tight in his grip, god, he was going to be sick.

_until there was one lone victor, nameless and murmuring for forgiveness and for release, and Henry was a little too quick to put that bullet in his friend’s head--_

The front door swung open and he stumbled inside, holding back the vile that was rising up his throat.

_and he remembered the stale cake he found on the kitchen table when P.I.E.P. finally released him, something small that simply read--_

“Happy birthday, Henry!”

The frazzled professor nearly jumped out of his skin when the lights to the living room came on, and the gun that he had previously been pointing at himself turned to instead point out at the intruders in his home. There were surprised shouts, and the strangers all threw their hands up in defense.

“Woah, professor, put the gun down! We didn’t mean to scare you!”

His wild eyes turned to the person who had dared to speak to him, and it took him way too long to realize who exactly she was. He slowly started to lower the weapon, his hands that had been steady before now shaking like leaves in a storm.

“E-Emma?” It was as though he was coming out of a deep trance, and Emma was absolutely terrified for him.

“Yes, it’s me, Emma,” she replied as calmly as possible once he had lowered the gun to his side. “And you know Paul and his friends from the office.”

It was true. He had met them a few times before at gatherings Emma would invite him to, but he didn’t really know them all that well.

“Jesus, I told you this guy was nuts,” the guy with a moustache (Ted, maybe?) loudly whispered to who the professor recognized to be plain ol’ boring Paul.

“Don’t be rude,” another man (...Bill?) piped up. Ted was about to argue, but a woman (Charlene or Charlotte or something) butted in.

“Oh, I knew a surprise birthday party was a bad idea! I’ve always hated those...”

The professor scrunched up his eyebrows in confusion, temporarily forgetting the reason he had come storming in all upset. “Birthday? Is that today?”

Emma looked exasperated, and the whole group shared a look before slowly straightening up and lowering their hands. “Uh… yeah. Did you really forget?”

Huh. He must have. He was about to say something when moustache-man cut in with a very polite, “Dude, did you just get hit by a bus or something? You look like shit.”

Everyone in the room shot Ted a look, but Henry could only grin at the cold honesty. “Yeah, maybe, I don’t really remember,” the older man trailed off as he tried to recollect what had happened previously, and Emma’s expression somehow grew even more concerned. The professor was already past that, though, pocketing the gun and finally taking a good look around his home. The whole downstairs had been decorated with streamers and other decorations, and he really appreciated the effort. “This is a birthday party, right? Is there any cake?” 

Paul was the one who flashed him a smile and gestured him towards the kitchen. “Of course! Emma made your favorite. I tried to help, so sorry if it looks bad…”  
They had all started to head out of the room, some more hesitant than others after that wild encounter, but Emma grabbed her professor’s arm to hold him back for a moment.

“Sir, are you sure you’re okay?” There was genuine fear in her eyes, fear that reminded him of someone or maybe some people he used to know. He happened to glance away from her face for a moment to catch sight of a framed photo hanging on the wall of the living room. Him and his friends…

“I think so,” he said genuinely after struggling to remember what had happened to make her so worried. He couldn’t remember much of anything from today; his doctor had warned him that could be a side effect of his new sleep medication. Another appointment to schedule, he supposed. Had he been not okay before? He couldn’t recall. “I’m… having a hard time remembering, but I think I’m going to be okay. Thanks for throwing me a birthday party.”

Emma still looked concerned, but she smiled hopefully up at him. “The surprise was Paul’s idea; we’ve been organizing it for weeks. Sorry we haven’t seen each other much.”

Henry returned her smile and was about to reply when there were shouts from the kitchen.

“Hey, we need the birthday boy!”

“Yeah, if y’all don’t get in here soon, I’m going to eat this cake by myself!”

“Ted, you shouldn’t say stuff like that! It isn’t very nice.”

“Do you guys think I overdid it with the streamers? I feel like there’s too many…”

Henry couldn’t help but chuckle, the first genuine noise to come out of his mouth in a long time. “Your friends are a riot. We better get in there.” But even as he tried to move towards the kitchen, he was stopped again when she wrapped her arms around him in a tight embrace.

“We can talk later, but... Happy birthday, professor.”

Maybe everything was finally going to be okay after all.

**Author's Note:**

> the next thing i write will either be really angsty suicidal stuff, a fluff fic of hidgens and emma (and maybe paul) just chilling, or some tedgens stuff. any thoughts? let me know


End file.
